It’s not the tax code

January 6, 2014Letters to the Editor

Since at least the time of Bill Clinton — the guy who gave us NAFTA — Democratic officeholders and office-seekers have been promising to repeal provisions of the tax code which encourage companies to ship jobs overseas.

What specific provisions of the tax code are they referring to? They never quite get around to saying, but I think we can safely assume these provisions could not have been enacted into law without a sizable number of Democratic votes in the House and Senate.

So, the Democrats are asking us to vote for them so that they can undo their own handiwork. How stupid do they think we are?

But it gets worse. The export of jobs is fundamentally driven by the difference in labor costs, not by the alleged tax benefits, if any. The only way to stop or reverse the hemorrhaging of jobs is by repudiating the “Washington Consensus” (NAFTA, GATT, WTO) and going back to a system of tariff-based trade, and nobody who matters in official Washington is willing to consider that option.